Posted
by
timothyon Thursday January 14, 2010 @04:03PM
from the about-that-rent-we're-seeking dept.

Dave Knott writes "Kodak is suing Apple and Research In Motion over technology related to digital cameras in their iPhone and BlackBerry smart phones. The complaint specifically relates to photo preview functionality which Kodak claims infringes on their patents. The company is asking for unspecified monetary damages and a court order to end the disputed practices. Kodak has amassed more than 1,000 digital-imaging patents, and almost all of today's digital cameras rely on that technology. Kodak has licensed digital-imaging technology to about 30 companies, including mobile-device makers such as LG Electronics Inc., Motorola Inc., Nokia Corp. and Sony Ericsson, all of which pay royalties to Kodak."

Obvious was my first thought as well. How long have cameras had a "preview"? Let's see, the very first camera I can remember was a Polaroid with the instant pictures. That camera had a view finder that showed you what to expect to see in the final picture. Every film camera I have every used had a "preview." Why was this patent granted? Just because it is a digital camera does that negate the decades of prior art in film cameras?

I can see a major difference between this a few finder.This will show a digital copy of the image in includes all the digital processing and sensor data. A viewfinder even in an SLR only shows what strikes the film. The chemistry of the film and how it is processed will have a huge effect on the actual picture. Yes I know that you do a lot of post processing with digital images but the original data is still delivered vs what happens with Film.Add in all the big companies that are paying fees for this and I would bet this is probably a valid patent. And let's be honest Kodak isn't an IP shill company. They make a lot of stuff and do a lot of research.

Kodak's "preview" patent says that you see all of the digital processing and sensor data? How do they manage that one on a tiny LCD? It's simply not the case that you get this with a digital preview. You see an approximation of what you will get. In fact, you see less than what you might using a viewfinder, especially if you are looking through a Minolta Alpha/Maxxum with Depth of Field preview.

Viewfinders, including ones that have a screen you view from a distance, have been around for a long time. In fact, maybe these people would like a few words with Kodak over their apparent patent:

That's called a "Waist-level" viewfinder, and they've been around for a long time (the first Rolleiflex DLR I can find reference to is from 1931). In short, I would like to see the full Patent application, and how Kodak represented the prior art and prior implementations of representing an image on a screen. The other thing I would like to see are the licensing agreements with the other companies. The article only mentions that the companies license patents regarding digital photography, and say nothing of licensing this particular patent. An unusual omission, in my opinion.

I wouldn't dismiss this patent so fast. It could be the option to show you the picture and then give the option to keep it or delete it. I don't know how old this patent is but again we are talking about Kodak and the fact that many companies have already paid up. What I am seeing is the usual response from slashdot to every patent that it is obvious. While some patents are granted for things that are not just obvious but have been in use for years not every patent granted is bad.And what we think is obviou

The other respondent makes some good points, but I also want to reiterate, since you seem to have missed it, is that there was no mention of other companies licensing *this* patent. Only that they license digital photography technology. If they do license this patent, I would like to see that in writing, and also see how much it cost them.

Polaroid cameras were never Kodak products. Back in the day, Kodak and Polaroid were the two dominant players in the consumer point-and-shoot market. When Kodak introduced an instant-print camera, Polaroid used a patent lawsuit to shut down the whole product line.

No, the preview takes other things into account besides just the framing of the picture - like the focus (which non-SLR viewfinders generally wouldn't), the lighting and exposure (flash notwithstanding), the color corrections (daylight/incandescent/fluorescent) and so on.

I remember, before digital cameras caught on, seeing a film camera that would show you a digital preview of the picture you just took. You couldn't do anything with it other than see that you'd framed things right. I don't know how it worked, but I would guess there was some sort of crappy CCD that took an extremely low res picture at the same time you pressed the button for the film.

You mean Apples multi-touch patent?
Lets see, multi touch was used before that on touchpads.
Capactitive touchscreens existed prior to the patent.
But for some reason Apple get a patent to use multi touch on a touchscreen, thereby forcing other vendors to filter and ignore data delivered by the touch screen.
Not enforcable in Europe, beeing a pure software patent and i cant see how such a patent can be granted since its it actually places restrictions on the interpretation of data provided by a hardware dev

I dont like the idea of patenting ideas.
Software just implements ideas, algorythms and methods.
Everything that can be done via software can be done by a human, pen and paper, given a sufficient amount of time.
And yes, i like "others work to be free", just as i like "my work beeing free". I have spent more time on my personal open source projects than on commercial projects.

I don't understand the aversion to software patents. Seems like, since software is even easier to copy, it is more deserving of protection.

I should clarify - I do understand the aversion, it comes from the whole "I want other people's work to be free" ethic that permeates this and other communities. I don't get why it's a valid principle may be what I should have said.

I disagree with the principle that being first to lay claim to an idea is justification for receiving exclusive use of that idea, and in practice a lot of these software patents seem like nothing more than subtle permutations of simple ideas, arranged in a series of legal tripwires to shut out anyone without a well-funded legal department and act as leverage against anyone else who does have a well-funded legal department.

And then in this case - a patent on being able to see how a picture will look before y

Apple revealed they plan upon suing everyone for infringing upon their equally obvious multi-touch patents. Also, Apple always acts like other people's patents are irrelevant while their own matter. So please do make Apple sweat a little first.

I'll be happiest if Apple's own successful arguments here are eventually used to help overturn their own silly patents.:)

It has gotten to the point that the only way for you to keep your useless patents is to pay other people for their useless patents, that's why. Taking a picture and displaying it on the screen isn't really even related to photography after the lens processes the data, the system has already enumerated the data and formatted it as an image at that point, plotting data points representing color on a Cartesian plane was never revolutionary or clever it was the whole point from day one. Just because you displ

Displaying an image on a computer screen is in no way novel, nor has it been for decades. Just because there's a CCD hooked up to the computer doesn't make it any more novel. There was a Supreme Court ruling [arstechnica.com] a couple years ago on the obviousness test. In that decision Kennedy wrote "The results of ordinary innovation are not the subject of exclusive rights under the patent laws." This is an entirely ordinary innovation.

As other posters have already pointed out, we don't have much detail at this time. But let us assume for a moment that the Kodak patent in question is over the ability to preview a picture taken....

We have had thumbnail representations of pictures for much longer than 20 years.

And given a digital camera, the first thing you might want, after you take a picture, is to see what the picture looks like.

If this isn't obvious, what is?

And exactly how does it advance the technology to have every company pay a "tax" to Kodak who makes a camera with preview ?

Toss obvious patents! Cut the lifetime of the rest to 5 years!

If we really wanted free markets, competition, and growth of technology, the goal would be to cut the number of patents filed in the U.S. by 75 percent! Big companies use patents to tax others, and to crowd out competition. Do we really think Kodak had to come around and invent preview for digital cameras? Hogwash.

They probably tried to patent the design of the human eye and God (big JuJu, whatever you call it) sued as prior art.

I am in a quandary over the entire patent vs. copyright issue. If you could patent a book then you could lock out all of your competition from writing about "Westerns involving horses and indians". In a patent you are going after an idea or design.

To me, software is a creative work more akin to a copyright. If someone wants to mimic your idea using a different software platform and uniquely c

The patent in question covers the circuit design for avoiding encoding and then decoding an NTSC signal that can be used to generate the real-time and preview time image from the camera. It isn't just a patent that says "we patent the idea of previewing an image", it is quite specific in the diagrams and even the background of the invention.

5 years? Many technologies take longer than 5 years to bring to market. Why invest millions in research to develop new technologies when you can just take what other people have developed once it starts to mature?

Your idea won't cause a growth of technology, it will absolutely destroy the profitibility of doing real research into new technologies.

I agree that there sure seems to be a lot of obvious patents that have been granted, though most are far more narrowly defined than you would think from just rea

Sounded to me like an "on a computer" patent. Like Amazon one-click patenting "put it on my tab" + "on a computer." This is patenting "viewfinder" + "on a computer."

I think that obviousness/prior art should fail if the patent is something that existed before, but is now the same thing "on a computer." Unfortunately, the patent office and courts don't seem to agree with me.

Thumbnail representations of pictures allowed you to look at a picture before you invested the time to wait for the full resolution picture to load. This is very much like a preview. The observation strikes at the "obviousness" of the patent in question. Right now, if I were to do a 3-D capture of a complicated object, I don't have a program to allow me to view it on my 3-D T.V. before I render it on my home 3-D printer. Mostly because none of these products are available yet to give meaning to that fea

I need to make a point more clearly than I did in my, er...., rant (I admit it)... above.

The coward asserted: "What the patent system is meant to do is allow companies/individuals to recoup research and development cost."

To which I pointed to the U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries"

The point I wish to make clear is that the U.S. Government has no constitutional motivation in seeking to insure that any company "recoups" anything.

Let's make that clear. EVEN if striking patents led to the damage of numerous companies, this is no justification for patents.

If an inventor or company fails to make money off their inventions, they will join a pantheon of historical figures and companies suffered that the same fate in the past.

No, what is important is the efficiency and the productivity of our companies, and the advancement of knowledge and progress. Most of us believe that it is only competition that drives progress. This is supposed to be why communism failed (no competition) and capitalism (competition) succeeded.

So why do we need to limit competition again? Because we need patents to compete with other such government defined and constricted systems like communism? Nobody would be willing to build a company unless the government set up a little space for it to thrive without anyone else competing with it?

The first thing I see amongst comments here is a bunch of stuff about invalid patents.

What the/. community needs to understand, is that not *every* patent is invalid just because its being used to sue.

Kodak is not a patent troll. They do real work, good work, and file patents on it to protect their inventions.

If there was ever a patent to assume is valid and in good standing, it would be a digital imaging patent, filed by a company that specializes in Imaging (and these days, Digital imaging).

Kodak is not evil. If these companies think they can implement functionality in their devices just because everyone else does, they need to think again. Everyone else is licensing the technology. If they are not, then they are infringing, and deserve to be sued.

As soon as we heard that cameras were digital, we pretty much immediately thought, "Oh I can't wait until we can have tiny screens to see what we're taking/took". It's the natural extension of the technology. If my dad can think of this, and I can, it's pretty obvious. The implementation of that, and the techniques you use to do it, should be patentable, but... isn't the existence of a preview screen something that pretty much any camera-user would have thought of? What am I missing?

Functionality is not a technology, it's a concept. The means to accomplish that functionality is technology. When the concept is as obvious as a preview on a camera, it shouldn't be patentable. It's just common sense.

A preview in a digital camera is not an ovbiously achievable technological task.

You are right. The tecnnology of a specific implementation of it should be patentable. But patenting "digital viewfinder" is what this sounds like, and that's not a technilogical task, patent, or anything technology related. Adding "digital" doesn't make it new, different, or hard. You can't patent an idea, and every time they allow 1,000 year old ideas to be patented because they are on a computer (incuding today's phones

What the/. community needs to understand, is that not *every* patent is invalid just because its being used to sue.

Perhaps not, but that's the way to bet.

Given that you already have1) The technology for a digital still camera2) The technology for a digital movie camera

is it really patent worthy to have a device which works like a movie camera until a button is pressed, at which point it takes a picture like a still camera? Because that's what Claim 1 of patent 6292218 covers. Oddly enough it only covers

Not to mention that virtually every digital camera on the market uses a Bayer filter, which was developed by Kodak.

It appears a lot of posters here are morons. We're not talking about a tiny, obscure company; nor are we talking about some little-known corner of technology. Kodak has been one of the largest (maybe THE largest) developers of the fundamental digital camera technology we use today.

is how long the iPhone and such have been on the market already. If someone markets a product in violation of your patent, especially when it is so popular as the iPhone, then you best ship up pretty quick and get it cleared up instead of waiting a couple years to make a fuss. That just shows that you finally realized you could make a quick buck and not that you just realized the patent was being violated.

is how long the iPhone and such have been on the market already. If someone markets a product in violation of your patent, especially when it is so popular as the iPhone, then you best ship up pretty quick and get it cleared up instead of waiting a couple years to make a fuss. That just shows that you finally realized you could make a quick buck and not that you just realized the patent was being violated.

Or perhaps, Kodak has been trying to reach an agreement with Apple without going to court since the iPhone was released and now filed suit after deciding that Apple was unwilling to license the technology. I don't know either way, but we don't have enough information to decide.

This was mentioned in another article I read earlier today on Gizmodo [gizmodo.com]. They also mentioned that Kodak has successfully sued Sun over Java implementing some of the same patent technology. Also, many other phone and camera manufacturers are already paying a licensing to Kodak for the patent. Apple and RIM just could come to agreements with Kodak over it and it is now going to court.

How about Apple use some of that pocket change they have laying around and do a little hostile takeover of Kodak.

Do you really want Apple to own a patent on photo previewing, and a thousand others? I'm sure they'll be kind and let RIM and Samsung and HTC and Motorola use those technologies at a very reasonable cost. Be careful what you ask for.

God forbid that a company that helped pioneer photography for the last hundred or so years be paid for doing so. These are real patents designed to incentivise R&D and prevent competitors cashing in on another company's research. Judging by the number of companies paying them they're not without merit - why should Apple be exempt?

Apple have redefined the mobile market and everybody wants to do a phone like the iPhone. They also don't need to own the market to be a success, just make a profit, which is a damn sight more than what Nokia is doing.

In 2008, Nokia had a net income of 5.77 billion dollars, Apple had a net income of 4.83 billion dollars. Their margins are lower then Apple's but they're a far bigger company. Get your facts straight before dismissing others.

Apple has "redefined" less than 3% of current market (and with the uptake of mobile phones in developing countries, areas in which Apple is not interested in, that percentage might as well go down); that's a curious definition of "mobile market" you have there. Also, it seems Nokia wants to go in a bit different direction, as their N900 shows (which is of course directly based on their earlier tablets; which were launched before first news of iPhone)

On top of that, Nokia is the only hugely profitable phone manufacturers. Others are either out of the market, struggling for a long time, or mobile phones aren't their main business (RIM is debatable here - do they market primarily mobile phones or corporate service?)

Apple has "redefined" less than 3% of current market (and with the uptake of mobile phones in developing countries, areas in which Apple is not interested in, that percentage might as well go down)

Absolutely. If Apple had "redefined" the market you'd expect the iPhone to have had an obvious influence on the design of every other smartphone released since the iPhone was announced.

Probably, large hardware manufacturers such as HTC would have written custom front ends to Windows Mobile to give it a more iPhone-like GUI. I expect some big concern like Google would have taken a leaf out of Apple's book and got into the smartphone market (maybe with a Linux-based platform). And everybody and their dog wou

Okay I'll bite - which definition of "redefined the market" are we using today?

and everybody wants to do a phone like the iPhone.

Really. So what features make a phone "like the iPhone" exactly?

They also don't need to own the market to be a success

The claim was that Nokia waited until the Iphone was a "raging success". So we have the classic Apple fan trick of redefining "success" in the market to mean something far weaker. I've seen this a million times before.

Apple is a "raging success" or "far more impressive", simply because they've been doing it for less? That makes no sense. We judge companies by their absolute success, and they don't get excuses simply because they've been doing it for less. But anyhow, I'm glad you agree that Apple are nowhere near as good as Nokia - as you say, they haven't been in it look, so what can we expect.

It's not like Apple are some teeny start-up - they've got billions of dollars at their disposal, and a trademark/brand that plenty of fans and media will give hype and free advertising to. On top of that, the phone industry is fast moving, and crosses over a large amount with computer technology, so playing catchup is easy (although it still took ages with Apple - 3G, and all the other features that were bog standard on phones for years before, yet for some reason it's the Iphone which is classed as a smartphone...)

If you actually look at everything in scale, the iPhone is far more impressive than just about anything Nokia has ever released in terms of sales numbers.

No, even in a given period of time, Nokia's sales are far greater, about an order of magnitude in fact. But let me guess, you've redefined "sales numbers" to mean something other than what it usually means.

Its rather retarded to compare a 4 year old product line to a 40 year old product line and use the word 'scale' so loosely.

Right, so if you concede that the 40 year old product line must be much better, why do we hear nothing about the Iphone?

These people aren't saying "Well the Iphone is nowhere near as good as Nokia, but hey, it's not bad considering it's only Apple"! They're claiming that the Iphone is the best ever. Claiming that by "best" you mean "not the best, but they would be if they'd been doing it as long, honest" makes no sense.

Retarded would be looking at 4 decades of mobile telephony history, of which Nokia is major part, as a 40 year old product line and disregarding that Apple entered only at convenient moment for them; and mainly into a small segment of total market, made ready for Apple by castration of phones and lax concept of "affordable". But it's very interesting how you perceive long standing dedication of Nokia to provide communication equipment to people as somehow lessening their success...

(how is domination started with Apple II going along? What, Apple pissed away their advantage, their early start?)

Ah, and there's another fantasy with sales numbers. All the while only one model from Nokia, 1100, sold more, during its much shorter presence on the market, than all iPods combined. It is the most popular single consumer electronics device in history. BTW, Nokia is by far the biggest manufacturer of portable audio players in the world (shipping more units annually than Apple has ever produced). Probably even flashlights, too... (since a portion of their most popular phones include a LED one)

While Apple sold 30 million phones in those 4 years (and they don't seem to really want selling orders of magnitude more, perhaps preferring a world in which communication is a luxury), Nokia sold a billion in the last 2 years + one quarter. It is greatly responsible, among others, for the fact that while a year ago there were 3 billion mobile subscribers, now there are around 4.6 billion. You're a slime not thinking about the future of humanity if you think that's not monumental, far above anything Apple has done lately (they did similar things at the beginning, popularizing the concept of personal computer; and even then their scale was nowhere nearby what Nokia is doing)

PS. I also value that Nokia maintains R&D centers throughout the world and that most of their manufacturing plants are NOT in China.

actually it sounds more like patent squatting. the idea of previewing a picture before taking it should not be patentable. The hardware/software to do so might, however, apple isnt using kodiak hardware.

These are real patents designed to incentivise R&D and prevent competitors cashing in on another company's research.

Strip away the detailed descriptions of the prior art and claim 1 covers having a button to take a photo while seeing a live preview. That's not a "real patent designed to incentivise R&D", that's patenting a feature.

It's not clear to me that this isn't patentable. Before the digital camera you had to look through the viewfinder - there was no other way. The obvious way to design a digital camera would be with the CCD array as a drop in replacement for the film. You'd frame your shot with the viewfinder just as you always did. The relevant question is whether it would be obvious to someone skilled in the art of camera design to stick a screen where there never was one before and pipe the CCD data to it. It's not the greatest leap in the world - but it was, at one point, novel and it might not have been obvious.

The problem we have is with the benefit of hindsight, every digital camera has a screen on it, so it's not easy for us to imagine it any other way. But a digital camera could work just as well as a film point and shoot and then you'd take your memory card to the photoshop for prints rather than scrolling through them on the display. So had the preview functionality never been invented, no one would have even thought of the camera phone.

If this was a non-obvious invention, the fact that we can't imagine a present without it, it means that this was an especially important invention that deserves protection.

Before the digital camera you had to look through the viewfinder - there was no other way.

That's not true. Look at a video that shows camera work on any TV show made in the 50s or 60s. You can see that the cameras being used have monitors on board that give them a preview of the output of the camera, which is what allows them to set up, prior to being committed to recording by the control room. Electronic preview of image(s) prior to recording. It's obvious. It's so obvious they had it figured out half a century ago. As to which button does it, or if it is digital in nature somewhere along the path... feh. Still bloody obvious.

For that matter, ham radio SSTV units (ie ROBOT 400 by ROBOT inc.) have had digital camera preview displays since (at least) 1976. You could preview on the monitor, you could shoot into ram and not commit, etc. Again, as soon as you have a camera that makes recordings of any type, the idea of "preview" is so bloody obvious it's almost painful.

"Judging by the number of companies paying them they're not without merit - why should Apple be exempt?"

He never said Apple was or should be "exempt". He suggested it might be a better deal for Apple to buy the whole company and reap the associated profits. You are so busy being anti-pro-Apple accusing someone of being pro-Apple, you didn't stop to read what was wrote and think about it apparently. That's OK. Judging by your 7 digit SlashID, you're young. You'll learn...

God forbid that a company that helped pioneer photography for the last hundred or so years be paid for doing so.

They did get paid for it, for the last hundred or so years. That wasn't enough? Well then they should come up with more pioneering stuff rather than claiming the obvious is theirs. Being able to preview the picture you've taken on a digital camera isn't a pioneering innovation that should be specially awarded.

No, it wasn't, it's an obvious feature of a digital camera. Since digital camera's are basically an extension of the camcorder which had live review since at least the 80's it should be obvious to someone not skilled in the arts, let alone someone who is. Besides the Casio QV-11 had LCD preview in 1995 and the Kodak patent wasn't filed until 1997.

If you go through the effort of reading the patent (pretty sure it is http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/6292218/fulltext.html [patentstorm.us] but it might be a similar, but slightly different, patent) you will find that the Kodak method is, indeed, novel. Previous technology (camcorders as well as the QV-11, which used CCD technology, not LCD technology) converted the signal to NTSC format before displaying it. It appears that Kodak's method "avoid(s) the necessity of generating an NTSC format signal in order to reduce the complexity of the required circuitry".
That's about all I have to say about this...

There's one of two possible things that happened here. Either at the dawn of digital photography it was so blindingly obvious to everyone investigating the technology to put an LCD screen on the camera so that you could preview the shot you just took that no one bothered to patent it, or Kodak got there first and everyone else adopted the concept after it was unveiled.

If everyone was working on the concept around the same time as Kodak, I would think the likes of Nikon and Cannon would move to have this pa

If Kodak is collecting royalties from every digital camera manufacturer and every cameraphone manufacturer (except Apple and RIM), then I would guess they are doing pretty well. There are lots of companies out there whose largest source of revenue has nothing to do with what the company is commonly known for.

It may not still be the case, but at leat at one point, Google's largest source of revenue was not from advertising, but from selling it's search technology to power other people's sites.

Why is this modded troll? It's completely true - TFA provides no information at all about the patents in question, what "technology" they claim to cover, and inexplicably included some portfolio information which apparently has nothing to do with the patent claim. It is a terrible, pointless article.

Well for what it's worth, i think your comment about the complaint about the troll mod is perfectly worthwhile. This response here, on the other hand, can be metametametamodded to oblivion for all I care. I'll just be over at tradingmarkets.com trying to find articles about kernel hacking.

Okay, the article has almost no information. All we know is that Kodak has asked that the offending devices not be shipped into the US. The other piece of information that we have is the stock prices of the three companies. WHY do these "reporter" insist on putting in a snapshot of the stock price at that moment in time? It has absolutely no value whatsoever yet they insist on putting it in. Totally meaningless and was one of the only factual items in the article. I hope I never understand business types....

You do know that the reporter is probably not a "business type"? There are very few reporters who have a clue about business. The reporter probably included the stock prices because it was one of the few facts he/she had.

Plus, it's something that everyone since the personal camera came out wanted. I remember when you had to wait to develop a whole roll of film and hope that the exposure/lighting was correct while thinking to yourself, "Man, I wish i could see the photo i just took without taking it to the store and getting it developed."

You know that a reaction like that is EXACTLY why someone would invent it and patent it.

If EVERYONE agrees that there is a problem, and then someone goes out and invents something that fixes

They didnt invent something that fixes the problem. That concept was around long before the technology to do so. They just invented one (or more) ways to accomplish that concept. If someone comes along and designs something that does the same thing in a completely different method, then that is their invention and not yous.

You missed an important point - The Slashdot community leans so far towards believing all patents are useless that it's virtually assumed anyone suing over a patent is wrong. It's not about (rather rare) pointless patent trolls at all. It's the rabid reactions of idealists who want everything to be free.